This is the industry's highest ever annual sales and an increase of 21.6 percent compared to 2016.

Global sales for December 2017 reached $38.0 billion, an increase of 22.5 percent over the December 2016 total and 0.8 percent more than the previous month's total, SIA said.

Fourth quarter sales of $114.0 billion were 22.5 percent higher than the total from the fourth quarter of 2016 and 5.7 percent more than the third quarter of 2017.

Global sales during the fourth quarter of 2017 and during December 2017 were the industry's highest-ever quarterly and monthly sales, respectively.

SIA president and CEO John Neuffer said: "As semiconductors have become more heavily embedded in an ever-increasing number of products - from cars to coffee makers - and nascent technologies like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things have emerged, global demand for semiconductors has increased, leading to landmark sales in 2017 and a bright outlook for the long term.

“The global market experienced across-the-board growth in 2017, with double-digit sales increases in every regional market and nearly all major product categories. We expect the market to grow more modestly in 2018."

Memory was the most significant semiconductor category by sales with $124.0 billion in 2017, and the fastest growing, with sales increasing 61.5 percent. Within the memory category, sales of DRAM products increased 76.8 percent, and sales of NAND flash products rose 47.5 percent.

Logic ($102.2 billion) and micro-ICs ($63.9 billion) which includes microprocessors - rounded out the top three product categories regarding total sales.

Other fast-growing product categories in 2017 included rectifiers (18.3 percent), diodes (16.4 percent), and sensors and actuators (16.2 percent). Even without sales of memory products, sales of all other products combined increased by nearly 10 percent in 2017.

Chinese vendor Xiaomi Technology saw its smartphone shipments soar 58 percent on year to 23.2 million units fn the second quarter of 2017.

Beancounters at Strategy Analytics say these results give the outfit a six percent global share. Global shipments gained six percent on year to 360 million units.

Xiaomi also recaptured fifth place in the global smartphone vendors ranking for the first time in a year, said the market research firm.

Samsung remained the top vendor in the second quarter, with shipments growing two percent on year to 79.5 million units for a 22 percent share in the second quarter.

Apple's shipments grew just one percent to 41 million units for an 11.4 percent share worldwide in the quarter. Apple's iPhone is out of fashion in China and this is placing a cap on its worldwide performance, Strategy Analytics said.

Huawei shipped 38.4 million units and maintained third position with a record 10.7 percent share in the quarter. Huawei is outperforming across Asia, Europe and Africa with popular Android models such as the P10 and Mate 9.

Oppo recorded a 64 percent on year shipment growth to 29.5 million units and maintained fourth position with a record eight percent share.

The death of the "game changing" keyboardless netbook continues as Digitimes Research predicts that only 35 million tablets will be shipped globally during the second quarter of 2017.

This is a 5.7 percent fall compared to last quarter and 13.7 percent on the year.

Apple, which is responsible for the technology fad, will sell only a quarter of the world’s tablets. Tablets launched or to be launched by other international vendors for 47.3 percent and white-box units for 27.3 percent.

The 720,000 Galaxy S8 phones were ordered in the first 7 days, which is quite a large number considering that South Korea has just over 50 million people. We are quite sure that the sales in North Korea were closer to zero than the 720K number.

Samsung doesn’t comment on how many of the 720,000 were the larger, 6.2-inch Galaxy S8+ phones, but we are sure that Samsung sold quite a few of them as well. With the rest of the world, it is easy to estimate that Samsung sold millions of the S8, and it seem like that customers didn’t lose the trust is the company after the Note 7 blow up fiasco.

The new Galaxy S8 smartphone will launch in two versions, one with the Snapdragon 835 and the other with Samsung’s own Galaxy Exynos 8895 SoC. Both are manufactured in 10nm and both have eight custom cores with "a similar big – little configuration" and Cat 16 GigabitLTE modem but, despite similarities, we expect quite a difference in at least some areas. Samsung realised that people like a larger screen in a smaller body and that seems to be the trend in the recent few quarters. It didn't went for three side bezel less approach like some of the China based competition, but again offered a very eye pleasing design with rounded screen.

This seams to work for the company as the Galaxy Edge phones enjoyed rather good sales and the Galaxy S8 already looks like a winner. Of course, we have to object the price, as we think it is way more expensive than it should. For some strange reason, that seams to work for the consumers who perceive that more expensive means better too.

Beancounters at IDC have added up some numbers and divided them by their shoe size and reached the conclusion that European server sales have slid by 12.9 percent.

IDC's EMEA Server Tracker shows that in the fourth quarter of 2016 the EMEA server market reported an on-year decline in vendor revenues to $3.62 billion and an on-year decrease of 4.7 percent. The numbers shipped fell to just under 600,000.

Revenues in the fourth quarter of 2016 declined 11.7 percent on year.

The biggest decline was seen in custom rack optimized server units and revenues, which decreased 38.1 percent and 39.9 percent respectively. Standard rack optimised servers recorded the highest overall shipment numbers at 294,000 units, while large system servers saw the highest on-year shipment increase of 21.9 percent to 1,706 units.

IDC’s Senior European Infrastructure research analyst Eckhardt Fischer said that the ODM market continues to show strength as it gains another percentage point share in Western Europe in the fourth quarter of 2016.

“This continued growth from the ODM market is indicative of the continued drive toward cloud, be it through well-established tier-1 providers, smaller service providers, or the hoster community in Western Europe," he said.

HP has 33.9 percent market share and remained at the top of the Western European server market, while second place Dell increased market share on year from 16.9 percent to 17.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016.

Revenues for IBM declined by 33.7 percent, due in part to non-x86 refresh cycles and the continuing trend of declining non-x86 shipments.

Finland, Ireland, and the Netherlands were the worst performers in the fourth quarter, with on-year revenue declines between 25 percent to 35 percent as both pressure from ODMs and slowed purchasing cycles from major service providers continue to create a turbulent market environment.

With 20.5 percent on year revenue growth, Italy outperformed its neighbours, while Switzerland saw an increase of 30.3 percent in shipments due to some large investments in the high performance computing market, such as the expansion of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre.

Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa server revenues declined by 16.8 percent on year to EUR730.63 million in the fourth quarter of 2016. This was because there were a limited number of infrastructure projects in the public space as well as the declining installed base of non-x86 servers were the major inhibitors in the last quarter of the year.

The Central and Eastern Europe sub-region declined by 25 percent on year with revenues of EUR$351.53 million due to the lack of demand in the public sector in Poland and Czech Republic, and a substantial reduction of non-x86 server sales in Russia. Pockets of demand were recorded among the service providers that continue to invest in off-premise infrastructure buildouts.

The global semiconductor industry had a record breaking 2016 according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA).

While semiconductor sales for 2016 saw a slight increase of 1.1 percent rise compared to the 2015 total, 2015 was good too.

The global semiconductor industry posted sales of $31 billion in December 2016, flat on month but 12.3 percent higher than year-ago levels. Sales for the fourth quarter of 2016 came were $93 billion, rising 12.3 percent on the year and 5.4 percent on quarter, the Association wrote.

Association president and CEO John Neuffer said that 2016 began poorly but the global semiconductor market picked up steam mid-year and never looked back reaching nearly $340 billion in sales.

"Market growth was driven by macroeconomic factors, industry trends, and the ever-increasing amount of semiconductor technology in devices the world depends on for working, communicating, manufacturing, treating illness, and countless other applications. We expect modest growth to continue in 2017 and beyond," he said.

Logic was the largest semiconductor category by sales with $91.5 billion or 27 percent of the total semiconductor market. Memory chips made $76.8 billion and micro-ICs $60.6 billion.

Sensors and actuators was the fastest growing segment, increasing by 22.7 percent. Other product segments that posted increased sales in 2016 include NAND flash memory, which reached $32 billion in sales or a 11 pe cent annual increase.

Digital signal processors sold 2.9 billion or a 12.5 percent, diodes sold $2.5 billion or an 8.7 percent increase. Small signal transistors sold $1.9 billion or a 7.3 percent while analogue chips sold $47.8 billion or a 5.8 percent increase.

LG’s V20 is doing rather well, with more than 200,000 of them leaping off shelves worldwide.

LG claims that around 200,000 units have been sold within that time frame, averaging 20,000 units per day. They are not exactly Apple-like figures,but it’s more than twice rate the V10 predecessor last year.

What is telling is that the V20 is a more traditional design. The modular LG G5 didn’t sell well, although the company has not admitted it. But the V20 also is packed full of the hardware and software to capture video and audio in a quality never before thought possible on a smartphone. It also has a 32-bit Quad DAC audio output which means the sound quality is top notch.

The V20 is the world's first smartphone to ship with Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box. It had some tough competition from Google's Pixel and Pixel XL, which are both running Android 7.1 Nougat.

The V20 has a 5.7-inch Quad HD display, and a secondary ticker screen above it. It's also among the most powerful models, thanks to its Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor and 4 GB of RAM. Other highlight features include 64 GB of expandable storage space.

Last year, LG reported sales of the LG V10 only after 45 days, it eventually managed an impressive 450,000 figure. The LG G5, on the other hand sold 15,000 on day one and then dragged itself along.

Asustek has reported net profits of $187.75 million for the third quarter of 2016, up 45 percent on the last quarter and 42 percent on last year. This could be a sign that the bad-old-days of poor PC sales are fading.

Sales of branded products totaled $33.5 million in the third quarter of 2016, up 14 percent sequentially but down three percent on the year. Operating profits reached $133 million, representing an operating margin of four million and an increase of 14 percent from a quarter earlier.

Gross margin for the third quarter stood at 13.9 percent , meeting the company's guidance of 12-14 percent.

Fudzilla ran a story just two weeks ago where we made a claim that the $579.99 is an awesome price for a machine with a Core 6y30 Skylake processor that can jump as high as 2.2GHz and has 4.5W TDP. One of the unique features of this notebook is that it comes with an additional M.2 PCIe slot, so you can upgrade your storage in a matter of minutes. You only need to open a few screws and plug in a new one.

The notebook with full metal body is 12.9 mm thin and compares favorably to some industry heavyweights including the Macbook 12 and the Dell XPS 13 but, of course, it sells for much less. Since it is drastically cheaper than the two we mentioned above, it makes it a great replacement for people on a budget. We have the chance to spend some time and travel with this notebook, and it is awesome, with 6 to 8 hours battery and 1.07 KG (2.3 lbs) makes it a great notebook. Of course, if you go to the extreme and dim the light you will manage to get even more than eight hours.

HTC cannot get a break in the phone market and it looks like the Vive VR, the outfit's over-priced VR kit, sold 140,000 pieces in August and September.

HTC chairwoman Cher Wang confirmed that the number will be higher when it starts being sold with a $499 PC.

This leaves us with mixed feelings. The product has been selling since March and it is priced from $799 upward, depending on the country. You need a good PC to play with the Vive, AMD advertises that it can be done with a $499 PC but you probably want to spend a bit more to get a "better experience".

Virtual Reality and Oculus Rift and HTC Vive need shedloads of GPU power and are only now making their presence felt. Their numbers will get higher, but it is hard to get excited knowing that only 140,000 Vives were sold when there are millions of PCs capable of running it at decent levels.

PlayStation VR is the killer app, or should we say the killer solution that is expected to get the VR market to another level. Some estimate that there will be two plus million PlayStation VRs sold before Christmas.

The console is not that expensive and many people own it. Getting the PlayStation VR will set you back $399 which is less than HTC is asking. Don’t get me wrong, HTC Vive is the best VR experience available but has many disadvantages.

There is almost no content at this time, big studios have started to work on titles, but there are no real games available, HTC Vive also needs a lot of space and an expensive PC to get the best from it.

We are slowly entering the era of Virtual Reality but lances inside of VR glasses needs to get better and you need a higher resolution displays insode of the VR glasses than the ones available.

That being said, one can easily get excited by Oculus and HTC Vive VR 2017 updates.